North Carolina’s Superior Court Judges met for their bi-annual Conference last month. There are always presentations at these conferences useful to those of us standing on the other side of the bench, and this Conference was no exception.

You can see the full list of papers and handouts from the October 2009 Conference here, but worth mentioning are:

An Administration of Justice Bulletin which contains a thorough examination of the law of recusal from Professor Michael Crowell, including the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Caperton. The Bulletin contains a subject matter overview of what looks like every North Carolina appellate decision on recusal

If you are a medical malpractice lawyer, you’ll certainly want to read Practical Tips for Trying Medical Negligence Cases, written by Judges Richard Doughton, Ed Wilson, and Catherine Eagles.

A presentation titled Ex Parte Contacts: When Can a Judge Trust a Lawyer? by Paul Ross, the Executive Director of the Judicial Standards Commission, and Judge Catherine Eagles.

And last but not least, there is Computer Essentials For Judges from Judge Ripley Rand and Professor Jessica Smith of the IOG. That lists a number of legal websites and "blogs of note," including this one.

I’ve written before about the materials from these Conferences, all of which are available on the IOG website. Those records back to February 2002, and there are literally dozens of papers on all sorts of subjects available.